Policy —

London police arrest four in Windows support scam bust

India-based scam callers pose as ISP employees.

Enlarge/ Customers of the telecommunications and Internet provider TalkTalk are among those who have been targeted in a Windows support scam operation in the UK. London Police announced the arrest of four suspected of involvement with the ring today.

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City of London Police, collaborating with Microsoft, have made four arrests as the result of a two-year investigation into rings of "Windows support" fraudsters. The arrests, London Police Commander Dave Clark told the press, "are just the beginning of our work, making the best use of specialist skills and expertise from Microsoft, local police forces, and international partners to tackle a crime that often targets the most vulnerable in our society."

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The four suspects—a man and woman working together in Surrey, and another couple working from South Shields, Tyneside, are accused of being involved with a scheme operating out of a call center in India. Their role in the scams is not clear.

The scam, similar to the one Ars intercepted in January, seeks to convince would-be victims to install remote-access software on their computers and then to set up recurring credit card billing for technical support or anti-virus software. In these cases, the scammers often posed as employees of the UK Internet service providers BT and TalkTalk, saying that they had been authorized by Microsoft to provide technical support.

Customers of TalkTalk have been specifically targeted in these scams, the BBC reported in March, by "industrial-scale" fraud operations employing as many as 60 people at a time in two rogue call centers in India, according to three people who were hired by front companies to work in them. It's believed that TalkTalk customer data was sold to fraudsters by employees of the tech outsourcing firm Wipro, which TalkTalk had outsourced some of its call center operations to.

A Microsoft spokesperson told the press at the announcement of the arrests that the public should be aware that Microsoft and its representatives would never cold-call to provide technical support.

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Sean Gallagher
Sean is Ars Technica's IT and National Security Editor. A former Navy officer, systems administrator, and network systems integrator with 20 years of IT journalism experience, he lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. Emailsean.gallagher@arstechnica.com//Twitter@thepacketrat